W.H.: Sequester 'deeply destructive'

President Barack Obama on Friday detailed how roughly $120 billion in cuts to the Pentagon and domestic programs will be applied if Congress doesn’t shut off a planned “sequester” before the end of the year, renewing an election-year political brawl over who is to blame for the nation’s budget woes.

POLITICO obtained an advance copy of the 394-page White House report, which shed little new light on the sword of Damocles hanging over Washington’s head but sharpened its political point.

The report confirms in painstaking detail which budget accounts are subject to cuts — down to the congressional visitors center — and which are exempt. And it is likely to add new urgency to efforts to stop the cuts from taking effect.

“No amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts. Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote. “”The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”

The fight over spending cuts will be unavoidable on the campaign trail. Obama faces the specter of deep reductions to Pentagon accounts — and the layoffs that defense firms say will accompany them — and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the GOP’s top budget negotiator in the House. If things fall apart, both will be blamed by their political opponents.

Republicans agreed with the president that the automatic cuts could have a devastating effect on the nation but accused him of failing to put forward a workable plan to avoid them.

”The release today of a report detailing across-the-board budget cuts—including the cuts to national security that the President demanded during last year’s budget negotiations—highlights the crippling effect these reductions will have on our nation’s security and underscores the urgent need for the President to work with congressional Republicans to replace these destructive cuts,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “[W]hile the report claims that the president has offered ‘balanced and comprehensive deficit reduction’ solutions, his plan was so unserious that it was rejected by every single member of Congress.”

The overview: There would be a 9.4 percent cut to most defense programs — except those exempted in the sequestration law — and a 10 percent cut to a handful of other Pentagon accounts that are not subject to annual congressional appropriations. Medicare would get hit with a 2 percent cut, while domestic discretionary programs — such as scientific grants and Education Department programs — would be subject to 8.2 percent cuts. Most mandatory domestic programs — those that are funded based on eligibility — would be slashed by 7.6 percent.

The president and his Democratic allies say that Republicans have put at risk the nation’s defenses — and important domestic programs — in the name of preserving Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans counter that Obama and congressional Democrats insisted on including the Pentagon in the automatic cuts as part of a landmark 2011 debt-limit deal.

”While the Department of Defense would be able to shift funds to ensure war fighting and critical military readiness capabilities were not degraded, sequestration would result in a reduction in readiness of many non-deployed units, delays in investments in new equipment and facilities, cutbacks in equipment repairs, declines in military research and development efforts, and reductions in base services for military families,” the president’s aides wrote.